My second and last daughter recently graduated from college, which finishes 8 years of college related air-travel (from the Midwest to the east and west coasts.) I’ve collected here some thoughts (some of which are probably pretty obvious) that might be useful for parents sending their kids off to college in the fall:

1. Use FF tickets for the students - The college students are unlikely to fly enough miles to obtain elite status. On both college trips and family vacations, use the frequent flyer tickets for them, and pay for your own ticket if you are elite, so you get elite benefits and credit towards new elite status.
2. College Plus – This one is unique to United, but there is a program they should sign up for called College Plus. http://www.united.com/page/middlepag...3,1271,00.html The most important feature is that they get 10,000 miles when they graduate, assuming they signed up before graduation. You just have to send in a final transcript after graduation. If they go to graduate school they can sign up again and get another 10,000. Another feature of college plus is the credit card, which has no annual fee and gives 1 mile for every two dollars charged. Our experience is that each daughter applied for the card; was rejected for a reason which didn’t seem to make sense, applied again, got a second rejection letter, but also got the card the second time.
3. Stopovers –. A domestic ticket on most airlines is 25,000, while a trip overseas is 50,000. But a trip overseas with a domestic stopover is also 50,000. During the longer breaks, such as spring break, we combined a trip home with a trip overseas for 50,000 three times. This worked well for us because Chicago is an overseas hub for International flights both east and west, but it might work just as well for many others.
4. How many accounts? – There is plenty of advice on flyertalk about whether to concentrate on one airline or get accounts on many airlines. We have done the latter, with accounts on each of the big 6. If you do, there are often promotions involved with signing up, so don’t open an account until either the student is flying on that airline or there is SPAM-like promotion for free miles.
5. FF 101 -- If you are a mileage junkie, like many of us on Flyertalk, do not expect your college student to also be one. They like the free miles, of course, but college students will definitely set their own time priorities. I found it easier to manage my family’s frequent flyer accounts, than to nag them to do so. You do have to politely remind them (repeatedly) to be sure to include the number for every flight, and to save boarding passes.
6. Promotions and Expiration issues – There are occasionally lucrative ff offers based on non-flight activities. I found that we could put a child’s name on our home telephone account, but leave the listing in our name, and make them eligible for miles in a long-distance phone program. You can also register credit cards that are in the adults name with IDINE in the name of the student. (In other words, you go out to eat with your own cc and they get the miles.) And be sure to keep you eyes on the SPAM forum for surveys, email signups, etc. This is also a useful way to generate occasional activity in a program that has some miles, but is getting close to 3 years of inactivity.
7. Visiting -- Another thing you can do to generate occasional activity is when you visit the student at college, if you have to make a hotel or motel reservation anyway. You can put the reservation in their name so they can get the miles/points. Elite hotel benefits don’t happen to be an issue for us.
8. Gateway city – This isn’t really miles related, except that it is needed for point 3. We found it advantageous to do at least one trip that was one-way (possibly with a throwaway ticket), so the college city is their “gateway” for trips home. Some good fares seem to have a maximum stay of about a month.

Please feel free to add other suggestions, point out weaknesses in our ideas, questions, etc.

For the parents paying for their students' tuition (or for those out there footing the bill for themselves), don't forget that many schools accept credit cards for tuition payments. Those mile-earning cards come in quite handy for the large charges.

Mike

Just beware that some schools also charge a fee for CC tuition payments. Worse, some of them (UVM comes to mind, grrr...) do not display this fact prominently.

My sons school does not take credit cards at all and my daughters school takes cc through net.pay. With a 2.5 per cent convenience fee this is not cost effective. I am reasonably sure payments throught net.pay do not qualify for double miles on United(the only way it makes sense to pay by cc.

Short

Very good info for the parent. Having one graduated from college and waiting for the mileage plus 10,000 to post I've missed some things along the way. I did real well with the tuition, no service fee and double miles from United, however you pointed out some things I forgot about such as using their name for the hotel. I figured my daughter would have to check in and that might be a problem. Like your # 5 she is not a FF addict like me. I manage the acct. She liked Mypoints so she could get her Macy's gift card and shop but at this point she is so close to her second one and has lost interest. I'd hate to take that over but I will and then I'll use the points. When I'm shopping and use the gift card maybe she'll get the hint. But probably not!

You're giving away a lot of personal information for 10K miles!!! What is that worth?

I'm thinking risk of identify theft and years of junk mail at the very least.

My son's starting college this fall, however, I'm taking a different approach. He's had status for many years and I think it's even more important for him now since the airports will be packed on many of the days he'll be traveling. The benefits will save him time and will help with irregular ops, so I'm buying his tickets. (And we like to use miles for international F as opposed to domestic awards.) It also helps that he chose a school that's about as far away as it can be while still being in the US. (Contrary to some FTer's thoughts, when it came down to the school that was 300 miles away or the one that was 2400 miles away, I didn't try to persuade him to go to the further one solely because of the miles; it was the difference in the equipment on the two routes as well .)

One thing I've found so far in booking some of his travel is that one-way tickets can work out well (what the OP noted in his last item). So many lower-priced tickets require return travel within 30 days. That doesn't work well for a college student, so I started looking at one-ways. I was pretty surprised to find they're pricing out at just a small amount more - and sometimes even lower - than the roundtrips.

His last semester final will likely be Dec. 22. If I have him come home Dec. 23 it's considerable more than if he comes home Dec. 24 and most coupons are valid on Dec. 24, but not the 23rd. (Of course, coupons also tend to require a roundtrip.)

A few of my thoughts so far, but I'd love to hear what other parents have done.

What sort of personal information does the transcript contain? Mine gives my name, student ID, school, years of attendance, and grades. I don't think identity thieves could use this to milk any funds from my accounts, so I figure I'm relatively safe. If your transcript is giving out more info that this, I'd bet you can just black it out and then send in a copy. UA shouldn't need your SSN, address, etc., to confirm graduation.

UA has a lot of personal information about you...name, birthday, passport number & date of birth (if you've travelled internationally), credit card number(s), travel history. I really don't see the problem with giving them your transcript. Grades won't exactly enable identity theft, either...

UA will accept alternate forms of certification:
copies of diplomas (mine's in Latin, though, so I'm not sure they'd want it!)
certification letter from Registrar's office--this is probably the best non-transcript option

Ah, University of Hawaii, excellent choice.

Actually, I goofed. It's 2704 miles away ... even better.